ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART 12

I developed a mercurial nature at a very early age.  I learned to internalize and keep the essence of me hidden away.  Call it survival skills or genetics, but I became withdrawn from people and refused to believe I needed anyone else.  Instead, I became a listener.  An observer of the world around me.

Nothing fascinated me more than the adults orbiting around our life in Arizona.  There were gin rummy nights soaked in sloe gin and loud conversation coming from a room filled with the thick fog of smoke.  I would sit on a chair in the living room, close enough to hear every word, yet nonchalant enough to look as if I cared about the game of Monopoly being played by the kids.  I hovered between both worlds and lost all interest in whatever childhood I had left.

My immature crushes on Dylan and Daniel were a thing of distant memory.  I had a new object of affection and as I sat perched on the arm of the couch, I wondered why I had wasted time on mere boys.  He was every cliché of a cowboy that had ever been written.  Wearing road weary blue jeans, black cowboy boots and a silver and turquoise belt buckle the size of a dinner plate, he walked into our house one night and I fell in love.  I stood there mutely staring at him as he was introduced around and reluctantly left the room so the adults could do whatever they did that made them cackle with laughter and talk loudly at each other.

The entire night I stared at his face.  He was tanned, probably younger than he looked and sporting a neat mustache beneath a mangled nose.  He was in town for the rodeo and one of the women of the group had brought him home.  He sat in his chair and she stood at his side, his arm casually around her waist.  I shivered at the thought of his hairy arm on my skin.  He was as ugly as he was beautiful, but I guess that was most of the attraction.

I became eager to fetch beers and refill the chip bowl, as the night grew longer and the crowd rowdier.  He pinched my cheek, calling me cute as a button and plopped a sweat stained cowboy hat on my head.  I had resisted the urge to run my fingers through his dark curly hair and stumbled over whatever thought came to my head.  I did not have a clue the power of lust yet, but I was awash in the hormones of puberty that were yet to develop.

It was close to midnight when my mother insisted I go to bed.  That apparently was the witching hour when the adults could no longer tolerate children’s presence and the more outrageous things would happen once we were ensconced in our bedroom.  I cajoled, pleaded, but to no avail.  As I made my way out of the kitchen, fighting back the tears that threatened to embarrass me, Merle had grabbed my hands, putting them on his slender hips and declared he would bunny hop me to my room.

There it was, this grown man, hopping down the hallway to my room, laughing as I giggled and then stopping at the door of my room.  I wanted him to kiss my cheek, to feel the tickle of his mustache on against my skin, but instead he tousled my hair.  He declared me a cutie, and then he was gone.  I was both mortified and elated at being called cute.

Later that night, I snuck out of my room to tiptoe to the bathroom and peek down the hall at the adults.  Merle sat in one of our kitchen chairs, his girl of choice on his lap and he was kissing the slender slope of her neck.  She laughed and squirmed, her drink sloshing from her glass onto the table.  Her mascara was running down her cheeks and she was undoubtedly drunker than anyone else at the table was, but still he wanted her.  I was cute, but was she what men wanted?

I saw Merle again at the rodeo that ended the Fourth of July celebration.  This holiday was a big deal in our small town.  It meant a parade of floats, men on horses and a shoot out in the town square.  There would be smoke, blanks being shot and men falling covered in fake blood and then carried to the parking lot of the Silver Spur in wood coffins.  Sunburned, covered in sweat and cranky, we would then drive to the fairgrounds where we would sit on the hood of our truck and watch the cowboys try to stay on the horses.

There had been talk the rodeo would be canceled that year.  There had been a tragic death at the last one.  A horse had bucked and fallen on top of its rider, puncturing several organs and killing him two days later.  Although it was by its very nature a brutal sport, the death hung heavy over the festivities.  It was decided to have the rodeo anyway, and just after the National Anthem, there was a tribute to the fallen cowboy.  I remember watching the cowboys, lined along the fence, wiping tears from their eyes and hiding beneath the brims of their hats.

As I sat on the hood, frying in the open sun and wishing I were anywhere but there, Merle walked up to my father.  They shook hands and then he turned to me, a beatific smile on his face and gave me a wink.  In my burgeoning adult like mind, winking back was the thing to do.  So I did.  He threw back his head, roaring with laughter and squeezed my shoulder.  He told my father then, something that has resonated with me my entire life, she is going to be a handful.

I was a handful, but not in the way he probably meant.  I grew up to make horrible decisions when it came to the matters of the cold dead heart I had tucked away.  Somewhere along the way, I lost all sense of myself and a belief I could be loved for who I really was.  I was a handful because I was impossible to know or pin down.  I was loved, but whom did they really love?

As the sun set and everyone was leaving the rodeo, Merle walked to the back of the truck where I sat with my sister drinking a coca cola and fighting off heat exhaustion.  He leaned in and kissed my cheek, his mustache tickling my cheek.  It was not a kiss of someone making an inappropriate gesture to an underage girl.  It was meant to reassure.  I knew it even then.

“You’ll be okay, kiddo.”  He said his voice soft and gentle like his kiss had been.

I’m not sure what he saw or thought he saw, but I knew his words were meant to convey a message of hope.  Looking back, I think he meant hang on until you really are an adult.  You will see all of this means so little.  You will have your own child, your own life and someday you’ll stop searching for who you are.  You will just find her, and you’ll be okay until you do.

Merle left town.  Springerville went back to normal after the Fourth of July fireworks faded from the sky.  There would be more card parties in the house, more drinks and laughter, but it had lost its luster.  I chose to bury my nose in a book rather than eaves drop on conversations I could not yet understand.

School was out soon and one morning I woke up to find my mother crying at the kitchen table.  I heard their words, but it was as if they were speaking from miles away.  Just snippets of information penetrated my denial.  The sawmill was closing.  No work for my father.  It was time to sell the house and move back to Kentucky.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART XI

My mother tightly coiled, always walking the fine line between despair and tension, began to unravel just before the holidays.  She began locking herself for long periods of time in the bathroom and I would stand in the hallway watching my sister push pictures beneath the slit of the door trying to cheer her up.  The part of me that used to care about whether or not she would open the door with a crooked smile and still sniffing tears had departed.  My compassion for my mother was replaced by anger.  I felt left alone to raise myself and my sister and angry with my father for not yelling at her to stop what she was doing.

When I left the house in the cool morning to go to school, I would no longer look back at my sister standing in the doorway, her fingers pressed against the glass as if beckoning me to take her with me.  I would tell her she was too little, but I also felt if she were home, nothing bad would happen to my mother that day.  When I was home, I refused to come out of my room unless it was dinnertime or my father insisted I come out and play.  I would count down the hours he was at home on the weekend, watching my mother pretend to be something other than what we saw during the days he was at work.  I roiled with anger and rampaged against whatever was happening in my house.

Then one day I arrived home to my fake grandmother making dinner and announcing my mother was in the hospital.  My father arrived later and told us it was an infected tooth.  She would be in the hospital for a little while.  It was as if someone had flung open the windows and fresh air was blowing through the curtains.  To this day, I am not sure what actually happened to my mother.  She was in the hospital for a week, we saw her exactly once, she burst into tears, and we were bustled from the room.

My father stumbled with being both mother and father.  He was unsure how to wash clothes and whites were suddenly tinged pink.  He cooked frozen pizzas for dinner, still slightly frozen in the center, but we ate happily anyway.  We built elaborate cities on the carpet with Popsicle sticks and went to bed leaving it there.  My mother would have balked at the idea.  I began insisting my sister take baths that consisted of more than splashing her face and laying out her pajamas for her nightly.  I cooked scrambled eggs for breakfast and burnt bacon and thought for the first time in a long time, there was nothing to worry about.

It snowed the morning my mother came home.  I remember standing in the door, watching the golf ball size flakes fall and blanket the morose brown ground we had refused to call a lawn.  In Kentucky, we were use to lush green grass sprinkled with dandelions and smelling sweet of earth.  I longed for the alfalfa fields next to our trailer when we first moved to Arizona.  I would run through them in my bare feet, the soft leaves tickling my ankles, lie down on a soft blanket of green, and watch the clouds.  Our yard at the house was nothing more than rocks and clumps of weeds.

My sister and I stood at the door calling for more snow.  When we first moved to the mountains, our first winter in Arizona, there had been enough snow for a snowman.  We had higher aspirations this time.  I thought an igloo was surely easy to build and we had a sled just waiting to be used for something other than dragging large rocks home from the dried up creek.  We stood watching the snowfall in our pajamas until my fake grandmother came in.  Dad muttered something about going to get our mother, and suddenly the snowfall lost its luster.

She arrived, looking thinner, but exactly the same.  She hugged us, told us how much she missed us and then went straight to bed.  My father doted on her, making her hot soup and bringing her the newspaper to read.  It is when I realized she was his other child.  The favorite one.  The one he had to tend to because she needed the most attention.  Instead of feeling jealousy, I felt saddened and resolute I would never need or want anyone to take care of me.

She was still too shaky for Thanksgiving dinner that year and we had it at my fake grandmother’s house.  My grandfather had been injured falling off a logging truck and there was talk of them returning to Kentucky.  Micah and I ate our dinners in lawn chairs beneath the carport.  It was freezing outside and there was still snow.  We watched Russ building a large bon fire in an empty drum, tossing in whatever sticks and paper he could find until it roared above his head.  Micah said he knew they would be leaving Arizona.  I told him I would be sorry to see him go, but glad to see Russ leave.  As we exchanged knowing glances, Russ threw two empty aerosol cans onto his fire and there was a sudden explosion.  The can tipped over and fire shot toward the carport.  When the smoke cleared, Russ stood there with singed hair and eyebrows, yet still smiling.  I could not wait for him to leave.

They moved away just before Christmas.  There were hugs and tears and at some point during the goodbye dinner, I hit Russ above the eye with a matchbox car.  All of the pictures we had in our photo album are of me smiling from ear to ear and Russ scowling with his eye swollen and turning purple.  It was my last goodbye gift to someone who would go on to cause damage in other people’s lives.  Micah and I cried, our shared experiences bonding us, yet things would never be the same.  We promised to write, but never did.  Out of sight, so they say.

With that, whatever family we had in Arizona was now gone.  There were friends, those my mother had yet to alienate, but we were ostensibly alone.  Christmas was a morose day of half heartedly opening presents and arguing between my parents.  There was a seismic shift in the plates of our lives, and I did not have a clue what it was.  My mother was torn between wanting to return to Kentucky and wanting to stay in Arizona where she felt truly at home.  I just wanted to get away.

Just after the holidays, my mother was in the hospital again.  She would be hospitalized several times as I grew up.  I often joked she had every organ remove you could spare to lose.  I will be honest and say I am not sure what it was that time in Arizona.  I am not sure my father even bothered with an excuse.  She was just simply in the hospital and then she was home again.  This pattern would play out through out our lives.

It was just before New Years, after mom was home and in bed again, the snow fell overnight.  A deep plush carpet of white covering our yard and our street.  I trudged out into it just as the sun rose and everywhere I looked there was just white.  I threw myself down in it, despite the cold and my thin coat, and made a series of snow angels.  I built a snowman with rocks for eyes and a mouth.  I threw snowballs at my bedroom window until my sister peeked out and then half dressed, joined me in the snow.  We laughed and played even as the sun grew hotter and our snowman began to melt.  This was what we had been waiting for, and it was perfect.  It made me believe if you waited long enough, those perfect moments would come; you just had to be patient.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART TEN

I like to think of Arizona as the place I found my sense of wonder for life outside myself and where my mother lost her ever loving mind.  Despite finally having the house of her dreams, the husband who loved her and the children who were for the most part were well behaved, my mother became even more miserable.  For the first time, she was working as a maid at a local hotel while I was at school and my sister stayed with my fake grandmother.  If possible, she became more depressed and withdrawn from us when she was home.  Her behavior concerned the family so much, my grandmothers showed up on our doorstep one day to save her.

Having her mother and mother in law under the same roof did not ease my mother’s nerves.  If anything, she became more high strung and volatile.  My grandmother, never one to be shy on her opinion, chastised my mother for allowing us to go native.  We were dirt covered tanned tomboys claiming lizards as pets and immersing ourselves in nature.  We were determined to be savages and my grandmothers begged my mother to return home to civilization.  It didn’t help you could hear the coyotes howling in the dark of night and dirt devils were becoming a daily event.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the grandmothers left and we were left behind.  Mother became what can only be called unhinged.  There were a lot of slamming doors, locking herself in the bathroom and rampages over spills.  We learned to avoid her at all costs.  My father, in his infinite wisdom, had a perfect solution.  He would begin taking her out to the bars for date night.

There were three bars and no grocery stores in our small town.   Priorities were determined.  So, every Saturday night, my dad put on his cowboy boots and ostentatious silver belt buckle and mom pinned her hair back and they went to the Silver Spur.  As excited as we were to have our parents out of the house, we were subjected to a steady stream of baby sitters that got progressively worse.

There was the one who boiled two cartons of eggs and made the largest bowl of egg salad I’ve ever seen.  The entire house smelled of eggs and cigarettes and her Shalimar perfume.  I begged my parents to never let her step foot in the house again.  Then there were the young teen girls who snuck boys in the backdoor and made out on our sofa.  The worst was an older woman who was saddled not only with my sister and me, but Micah and Russ.

Russ in all his deviancy could be entertaining with the babysitters.  He was determined to either make them cry or leave.  He felt he was too old to be under supervision.  The babysitter that evening was sweet and determined we would have a good time playing monopoly or watching television.  Instead, Russ began a standoff in the bedroom that lasted for hours and resulted in our parents being called home early and the door being taken off the hinges.  Micah and I camped in the hallway and begrudgingly admired Russ for an amusing evening.

Going to the bar meant my parents made new friends.  One couple in particular was as far removed from the locals as possible.  The wife wore heavy make up and low cut blouses, unheard of in our small town.  The husband was witty, charming and cared whether he had dirt beneath his fingernails.  There house was on the outskirts of town, a rambling two story jammed with paintings and art.  There was always music playing and weekend barbecues to attend.  They served raw oysters on the half shell and I found it decadent beyond belief.  I wanted to be adopted into this family.

Every weekend I spent on a barstool in the kitchen painting bird houses or stenciling mirrors with my friend’s mother I had taken as my own.  While all the children were off riding bikes, I was listening to Etta James and Billie Holiday with the father.   I felt as if I belonged to these people and hated to go home.  How could you not love a mother who shaved chocolate onto big dollops of whipped cream in your hot chocolate?

Their creativity was never more apparent than at Halloween.  The mother’s love of all things Halloween and her determination to decorate every inch of their house, inspired many parties I threw well into my adulthood.  While I was accustomed to plastic face masks and ill fitting Barbie pajamas as a costume, she would make intricate costumes for her children.

Her son that year went as an African American baby.  He wore a sky high afro wig, black face and a white diaper as a costume.  Racist?  Sure.  But in our small town of Arizona there were no African Americans.  The only minority was the Native Americans who resided in small hovels at the edge of town and on the reservations.  My family was shocked having grown up in a much more diverse area.

The daughter was a beautiful butterfly.  I would sit on the stool and watch the mother dot the gauzy wings with glue then sprinkle with glitter.  I wanted to be a butterfly.  Instead, my mother decided I would be a hobo.  Easy enough costume.  I would look upon those wings the days before Halloween with such envy, wanting to wear them myself and my friend’s mother could tell.

She pulled my mother aside and said there was still time to make a second set of butterfly wings.  My mother, not entirely uncreative, balked at the idea.  Looking back, I think she saw my longing for something else other than the life I was leading.  It was her first indication I would not be like them, nor would I ever be.  I would always want something else and she felt rejected.  We left my friend’s house that day and never returned.  I saw them on Halloween night, the boy in his black face and my friend in her beautiful purple and pink butterfly wings and black leotard.  The mother looked at me in my ill fitting hobo costume and patted my shoulder.  She leaned over and whispered, “Someday you’ll make your own butterfly wings.”

She was right.  Someday I would create and make, despite those who told me I couldn’t.  I missed those weekends spent painting and talking about the perfect color blue.  My mother had cut me off from the lifeline of my creativity, but she had not killed it.  Instead, I would cut beautiful pictures from magazines and save them in a box.  I began writing down the words floating in my imagination and recreating that world I found at someone else’s house.  My butterfly wings were words that carried me far away and she had not even realized it yet.

Happy Halloween.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART SEVEN

There is a fine line between exposing one’s self and showing off an appendix scar.  I think I could be guilty of both as I unbuttoned my jeans and showed everyone the four-inch red incision line on my first day back to school.  There was a certain sense of pride that I had survived not only surgery, but an infection.  Not that I understood the implication of either.  I was the only one in my grade missing an organ, and that made me quasi-famous.

I did not lie, but neither did I correct the wild rumors.  Someone asked me if my guts exploded and I just held up my hand and told them I couldn’t really talk about it.  A girl from another grade said she heard I had died and was brought back to life.  I shrugged mysteriously and moved through the lunch line.  Suddenly there were new faces at my lunch table and they all wanted to know what it felt like to be sliced open.  I didn’t bother mentioning I was asleep.

Having surgery did slow me down.  Since they apparently used super glue to close my incision, I was afraid for months it would suddenly open to expose a gaping hole where my appendix had once been.  I was afraid to go down the slide, ride my bike or climb on the monkey bars.  I begged off jumping off sheds until I was certain I wouldn’t explode on impact.

It was during this hey day as a school celebrity, Dylan began noticing me.  He carried my lunch tray to my table.  He sat across from me and told me lame jokes.  He drug me behind the first grade trailer and asked to see my scar up close.  With a finger he gently touched the still tender wound and smiled at me.  My knees felt weak and I could barely speak, but I remember making an equally lame joke.  He laughed and my heart sang.  I sat in the classroom fantasizing about the beautiful flaxen hair children we would make.  My near death experience had convinced him what he had been missing.

Apparently, near death experiences aren’t nearly as interesting as a new girl in school.  How quickly I fell off my pedestal when the dark haired girl from the Navajo Reservation was suddenly thrust into our classroom.  She wore beaded bracelets and pulled her shiny black hair with leather ponytails.  She told stories of powwows and her traditional beliefs.  My organ pickling in a jar in some hospital was suddenly deemed not as worthy.  I watched as Dylan pulled on her ponytail and whatever daydreams of our life together were gone.  Apparently shiny new objects attracted him.

Dejected, I found solace with Daniel who had visited me in the hospital and brought me lifesavers.  He rode me on his bike and avoided potholes and bumps to keep my remaining organs intact.  He held up barbed wire fences so I could crawl under rather than over.  He stole heavy gold bracelets from his mother and slide them on my arms.  We would sit for hours on the edge of ditches they were building for underground utilities for the new houses being built.  Sometimes we would talk about general things or sometimes we would just sit and say nothing.  I didn’t know it then, but he understood me.

I came home one evening at my curfew of dusk.  It didn’t matter where we were, we just had to be home before dark.  As a kid living in the mountains, you didn’t bother arguing with that logic.  Just as the sun began to set, the howling of the coyotes and wolves began, and you wanted to be inside.  My father was home early from work and I thought this meant he had lost his job.  My stomach seized at the thought of living in something smaller than the tin can we called home.

Instead, he announced he had bought us a house.  Well, actually a plot of land they would be building a house on.  Three bedrooms he said excitedly and we will have two bathrooms.  My mind was on overdrive with the possibilities.  No more sharing a room with my sister!  No more arguing over bathroom time!  No more being trapped in a container so foggy with smoke we could barely see out the windows.

The best news, it was close to where we lived so I could still ride my bike to visit Daniel.  We would have our own yard and the Arizona equivalent of grass which was a dirty yard with sporadic tufts of weeds.  I remember my mother smiling and laughing for the first time in what felt like years.  She was happy to get out of the prison van too.  A brand new house, not in our wildest dreams did we ever think that was possible.  I was already picking out paint colors for my room.

I excitedly told Daniel about the move and he frowned.  I wasn’t going to be that far away, but we could no longer just walk across the street to see each other.  I would have neighbors and would probably be riding bikes with them.  He was angry at me for allowing myself to be moved.  As he stormed away in a huff, I stood there on the dirt road feeling confused.  How could someone be happy and sad at the same time?  My child mind couldn’t wrap itself around that.  Why did something have to be taken away in order to gain something else?

I cried myself to sleep that night, not sure if it was out of joy or sadness.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART SEIS

I remember words and phrases that sounded like “surgery,” “infection,” and “rectal exam.”  I was bent over and violated by a sympathetic doctor who then told my mother my appendix had burst and I was to be admitted.  I stood in line at admitting.  The pain was throbbing in my right side and I did not fully grasp what was to occur.  My mother was crying and all I could care about was the pain ending.

At one point the pain was so severe, I just remember blacking out and waking up in a gown and having an IV inserted into my hand.  The nurse looked at my mother who was crying hysterically at my side and rolled her eyes.  I smiled at her and she smiled back.  I’ll never forget that kind face and the pat she gave me on my head.  “You’re going to be just fine.”  She said, and I believed her.

Coincidentally, or maybe not if you believe in destiny, the surgeon who would be removing what was left of my appendix was from my hometown.  This dried my mother’s tears.  I thought they had flown someone in especially from Kentucky to cut me open.  For a brief shining moment I felt special.  This was quickly dashed when they gave me a shot of medicine that set my veins on fire and I found myself drifting to peaceful sleep.

My eyes opened to a nurse calling my name and gently shaking me.  My throat hurt and I could taste rubbing alcohol.  I could feel a throb in my side and asked if I had stitches.  I was disappointed they had glued the incision shut instead of cool black sutures I could show off.  She promised there would be a scar, so it wasn’t a total loss.

I was in the hospital for a week due to the infection.  What transpired was an endless string of meals consisting of jello and broth.  To this day, I still cannot stand jello.  The food was just this side of bearable compared to my mother’s dinners, so I didn’t complain.  There were visitors to entertain and gifts to accept.  My sister was not allowed to visit in the hospital, so she was taken to the movies by my father.  I still bring this up as practically child neglect.  How dare he choose to take her to the movies while my life was hanging on by a thread.

Then I was expelled from the hospital in a wheelchair and told I would be out of school for a couple more weeks.  I didn’t like school anyway, so this was just the news I was waiting for.  I was tucked in a bed with magazines and a radio and told to take it easy.  If I had more organs to donate, I would have surely volunteered them.  Even my mother seemed to have softened due to the guilt of almost sending her oldest child to school to die from sepsis.  I would take away from this experience a hard lesson.  The special treatment didn’t last long.  Queen for the day was a fleeting crown.

Within a week my mother was crawling out of her skin having to tend to her sick child and my little sister who did not understand I needed to rest.  Instead, she wanted to hear stories and touch my scar and share popsicles with me.  I think this was an important time for our bonding.  We became close and I feared she would inherit my incredible bursting appendix.  I became a little mother to her, and she was happy to have me around.  My mother, on the other hand, was ready to have her life back that included watching the Price is Right in peace.

I was ready to run and play myself.  I missed my friends and was anxious to be out of the house and in the fresh air.  I’m sure this extended period of togetherness forever altered my relationship with my mother.  She was already on the edge and to have a child have emergency surgery then be underfoot for almost a month must have been a lot to take.  I think maybe she resented me for the imposition on her already tenuous hold on her sanity.  It didn’t get any better after that.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART 5

So, I could overcome the heat, dust storms and fatality around every corner because I was in love with two boys at the tender age of eight.  They were like photograph negatives of each other.  Dylan all blonde and light skinned, Daniel with his dark hair and dark eyes.  They also had very different opinions of me.  Dylan completely ignored my every word and attempt to make eye contact and Daniel would steal his mother’s jewelry and hand it to me at the bus stop in the morning.  When I received my first new bike with the purple seat and tassels hanging from the handlebars, it was Daniel who taught me to ride it and would cruise along side of me in case I fell.  When I inevitably fell, it was Daniel who picked me up.

By a mere stroke of chance, we had moved to a trailer not far from where Daniel lived in his.  When I say a trailer, I mean barely a two-room vacation pop up.  My parent’s bedroom was at one end, living room and kitchen at the other, and my sister and I slept on bunk beds in what was a hallway.  The entire trailer was about the size of a hotel room.  Not exactly the paradise we had planned, but there was good news.  We were having a house built in a new subdivision.  This would only be temporary.

What was not temporary was my mother’s new found excitement for Arizona living.  She began taking tennis lessons while we were at school, and started cooking again.  Well, she would make what was supposed to be food.  I don’t remember many dinners, I do believe I have repressed those memories.  There were sly attempts at sneaking us liver disguised as steak.  Thank goodness I had round cheeks I could stuff like a hamster with bites of liver and Brussels sprouts to spit out later when I went out to feed the dog.  She would rail against us wasting food, but her logic about kids in Africa did not hold water with me.  I was sure they were eating better than we were.

So, I went to school during the day, staring forlornly at Dylan and during the afternoon, I would ride my bike with Daniel and accept whatever piece of jewelry he had managed to filch from his mother.  Of course, my mom always made me give them back, but it was the thought that counts.  He adored me, and I in turn adored his adoration.  Really the perfect relationship.

During this time, my parents pretty much ignored me.  At night, I would sit with my sister watching a crummy television and thinking of stories to tell.  There was nothing better to me than making my baby sister laugh.  I would climb up on my top bunk, listening to the coyotes outside howling their goodnights and I did feel happy.  I was glad we had moved across the world.

All was well until my curiosity got the better of me.  Daniel was in our backyard and like any boy out in the woods, when he had to go, he just went.  He simply unzipped his pants and let loose in a small ditch.  Now, I was young and curious.  So instead of looking away, I stepped beside him and examined the goods, as any inquisitive young girl would.  I knew boys had different equipment.  I had seen my male cousins when they were babies.

To my mother who was washing dishes and watching from the window, this was apparently a huge deal.  To describe her as a screaming banshee is an understatement.  She snatched me up and drug me by the arm back into the hovel we called home.  There was a belt spanking and I was told what I had done was very nasty.  As I sat carefully on the edge of the bed, there were no tears.  So, I had seen a boy’s penis.  Big deal.  It wasn’t that impressive.

The next day she forbid me to see Daniel.  I told her I wouldn’t, but would just hop on my purple bike and hide it behind his shed while we sat in his room and listened to music on his tape player.  His mother adored me, she would make me homemade tortillas, and fruit punch.  She would occasionally trim the hair my mother butchered so it would grow back normally.  I use to pray she would want a daughter so much she would insist I come stay with her.

I felt sure I could still harbor dual crushes on Dylan and Daniel.  Dylan barely knew I existed anyway.  Well, that is not exactly true.  He did know I existed.  I had become the object of his teasing after I spilled an entire container of black paint on our teacher.  The room was divided.  Half thought I did it on purpose and admired me, and the other half just thought it was hilarious.  Dylan was one of the latter and would laugh every time there was a painting project.  My teacher did not.  I was not allowed to handle paint after that day.

Humiliation burned my cheeks with embarrassment.  Nothing worse than having the object of your affection think you’re a joke.  However, I learned to play along with it and in turn realized I could not at any point take myself too seriously.  In the whole scheme of things, spilling paint was such a small thing and it was actually very funny.  The look of horror on my teacher’s face as black paint splashed her white pants and white shirt was humorous.  Because I did not become upset with his teasing, Dylan actually began paying attention to me.  I was like a boy, he said, I didn’t freak out or cry.  So there it was.  The reason why over the years I would have more male friends than female.  Why I always seemed to have a boyfriend.  I was one of their tribe and they accepted me.

I was thrilled, elated and would sit at recess with Dylan every day listening to his stories of his older brother.  When he told me about “rubbers,” I pretended to know what he was talking about.  The image I had in my mind was not very accurate.  But I didn’t want to show my ignorance.  I also knew enough I could not ask my mother or father.

Everything would have been perfect, except one morning I woke up sicker than I had ever been.  I had eaten my mother’s dinner the night before, and surely that was the culprit.  My mom had a full day of tennis and whatever else she occupied her time with and insisted I had to go to school.  I couldn’t even get off the bathroom floor, let alone walk.  Begrudgingly, she called the nurse who suggested hot tea.  That was an even worse idea and there was suddenly pain.  I remember lying on the cold tile floor of the bathroom and staring at the ceiling light.  If I died, would Dylan always remember me as his first love?  Would Daniel?

There was also the thought of if I died; I hope my mother would be racked with guilt the rest of her life for yelling at me I was going to school.  When my mother returned to the bathroom, she looked worried and not for herself.  Surely, I could get some mileage out of this.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART IV

After moving out west, my mother had two moods, depressed and angry.  It must have been difficult for her I concede.  She was young and thousands of miles from home and living with two small children in a confined space.  My father worked all night and slept all day.  Living in a new area with all its dangers could not have been easy on her.

When we first moved to Arizona, my father worked at the Arizona State Prison.  I knew he was a guard and the position stressed him.  I overheard him discussing with my uncle one night the tour of the gas chamber the new guards had been on.  I pictured those old movies with prisoners escaping with bed sheets and nail files and could not sleep at night until I heard my father return from the late shift.  I would wait for him under the table and watch as he ate the dinner my mother saved for him on a plate in the oven.

We all breathed a sigh of relief when a job came open at the sawmill just outside of town.  It was steady pay and steady work and it meant my father did not have to deal with murderers and rapists on a daily basis.  At least not convicted ones.  It also meant he worked outdoors in the heat during the heat and could be at home with us at night.

Due to my injury, I was forced to stay indoors with my mother and my sister while dad went off to cut down trees.  Trust me, I did not like this any more than they did.  I would hobble around with my bandaged foot and spend my day coloring and writing.  It was during this time I wrote my first book about a witch who lived in a trailer vaguely based on my mother.

Then one day dad was home in a cast.  A tree had fallen on his foot, we were both hobbling around the trailer, and mom was losing her mind.  I remember spilling a bowl of Fruity Pebbles on the kitchen table and she would not speak to me for two days.  My father finally read her the riot act and all was forgotten, for a moment.  She was homesick.  She missed her parents.  There was no pleasing her.

Me, on the other hand, ran outdoors as soon as the bandage was off my foot and did not look back.  Summer was almost over; there were too many dangerous things to try before school began.  I was a constant fixture in the fields with my uncles who were barely older than I was.  My grandfather had remarried and had a son three years older than me and the youngest one month after I was born.  They and a group of rough and tumble boys were my only friends and I aspired to keep up with them.

This meant catching lizards with my bare hands, walking the plank over a pit of broken glass and nail riddled boards and jumping off a shed over a barbed wire fence.  I was, to say the least, fearless in my attempts to show I could do everything they could do and better.  What is a miracle is I did not see the inside of the hospital more than I did.  Some of that could be attributed to my mother, who believed in unless you were punctured enough to gush blood, you could walk any injury off.

I did not want to be a boy, I simply wanted to best them.  It was during this summer my hair was long and bleached out and a chore to wash and comb out every night.  My mother was not sympathetic of a tender scalp and would hit you with the brush if you dared to complain.  One night, I begged her to cut off my hair and she was happy to oblige.

I had in mind a cute pixie cut easy enough to wash and let air dry, but would still indicate I was a girl.  So much for daydreams.  Instead, she butchered off inches and inches of my flaxen locks until I was left with a Buster Brown cut that did nothing for my girlishness.  I cried nonstop until she made me an appointment at the Aloha Beauty Salon the next day.

Two things happened at the beauty salon.  The owner/hairdresser chastised my mom for doing such a bad job and I was secretly thrilled someone could tell my mother she did something wrong and she had to take it.  Second, I met Daniel.

His mother was white, but his father was Hawaiian, and he was a beautiful dark haired boy, on the heavy side with a smile that dried my tears.  He told me he liked me in short hair, and I was officially in eight-year-old love.  My uncles told me I looked like a boy, but I did not care.   Daniel had said I looked good and that was all that mattered.

Less than a week later, my mother pushed me out the door one morning when it was barely light out and told me I had to walk down the half-mile dirt road to

Still recovering from the haircut

the bus stop.  School had started suddenly and I was not at all prepared.  I walked the entire way down the road, saw two kids at the bus stop and walked back up to where my mother informed me I had no choice.  There were probably threats of bodily injury if I missed that bus.

Terrified beyond all belief, I trudged back down that road in tears and climbed on that bus, praying it was going to the right school.  Instead of brick buildings usually associated with school, we were led to a series of trailers.  I would be taking class in one of them.  Still disoriented, with my hair too short to hide behind and my hands trembling, I met my teacher and my classmates.  I was an interloper and a specimen to be dissected.  “Tell us how you came to Arizona,” my teacher insisted.
So, instead of tales of beds in the back of a station wagon and a detour in Texas due to a horrific accident, I regaled them with a plane that crashed over water and my father who had to save us all.  At the end of my story, the teacher nodded, obviously not as impressed as my classmates were.  She said, “Quite an imagination you have there.”  I merely shrugged.  She had not been specific she wanted the truth.

As I sat in a desk at the back of the room, someone tapped on my shoulder.  I turned to look into the pale blue eyes of a boy with hair as white blonde as mine was.  His skin was golden brown from the sun and when he smiled, there was a gap between his teeth.  Just like mine.  I remember staring into his eyes as he asked me, “Is there an ocean between Kentucky and Arizona?”

I swooned.  My first of many stupid boys who would blind me with their good looks.  I shrugged and learned his name was Dylan.  Now, I no longer wanted to best the boys.  I wanted to sit quietly beside them, giggle at their every juvenile joke, and bat my eyelashes like they did in the movies.  I was going to settle in Arizona just fine.  Being in love, even meant mom’s mood swings could be tolerated.  If I had only known what was in store.

Hmmmmmm

So I’ve returned..the prodigal daughter

More like the black sheep of the family

And no, my parents do not read my blog

My mother commented on my hair as soon as I walked through the door

She has been sighing heavily

And tut tutting

I’m in my grandmother’s room

Which has now become a shrine to a woman who died over a year ago

The last National Enquirer she was reading is right there on the table

The shelves are cluttered with bear figures and dauschunds

On the bottom shelf –

Two ornate glass jars containing the ashes of my dead grandparents

I keep looking over as if they are somehow watching me

There are enough plastic plants in the room to qualify as a funeral parlor

It is enough to be depressing

Instead, I’m optimistic

This is not the worst there is

Not by a long shot

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART TRES

We moved to a trailer in a desert with no television, radio or reason to live.  Surely, tribes in the outermost reaches of a Brazilian jungle had better accommodations.  My parents plied us with comic books, novels and a monopoly board.  This, of course, did not take the place of a working television.  I was hoping our “real” family would rescue us from this psychotic set of parent’s clutches.  Instead, we suffered in the heat, whining we were bored.  My mother in her infinite wisdom decided to send us out into the scorching sun so we could no longer interrupt her daily sobbing spells.

So without the benefit of sunscreen, we huddled beneath the scarce pine trees looking for shade and watching the other similarly abused children hide beneath decks and cars until the sunset and we could go back inside for dinner.  The funny thing about the desert is that at night it was cold.  Therefore, you spent all day frying in the sun and then at night you covered yourself in layers of blankets.  To this day, I am not sure how long this torture continued.  I just remember one day we were in the desert and then it was time to move to the mountains.

The Superstition Mountains of Arizona were beautiful, majestic and full of things that given the slightest chance would eat you.  We were in a trailer at the foot of a tall hill and at night in the pitch-black darkness, you could hear the howling of the coyotes in the distance.  Except some nights, they were not so distant.  They were roaming in the alfalfa fields on either side of our trailer.  I would have been frightened by their presence, but I was more concerned about the mouse living in the bathroom.

This trip to the mountains was also the first time I contracted strep throat.  I remember this distinctly because as my parents hacked their way through two packs of cigarettes each daily, I could no longer breath in the confines of  the smoked filled coffin we called home.  One night delirious with fever and unable to swallow, I remember lying on my side in the bed, the light from the bathroom illuminating the tacky tile floor and there was the mouse.  Scurrying along and then pausing to look at me.  I would have screamed in fright had any sound been possible from my swollen shut throat.

A trip to the local doctor, a shot of penicillin and bed rest, and that is where I lay for a week watching that mouse watching me.  At the time, I did not think about bubonic plague or the diseases they carried.  I simply did not want it in my bed and snuggling on my pillow.  Night after night, I watched that mouse unable to sleep until finally I told my parents about it.  A quick snap of a mousetrap and it was gone.  I had been responsible for its demise and I was racked with guilt.

When I was better, we began taking weekend trips into the mountains for rest and relaxation.  For one, there is no rest.  You must be aware of your surroundings at all times.  If you wonder why, refer to the list of things that will kill you.  The woods contained all elements of danger.  Half-fallen trees called widow makers, the tell tale rattle of a rattlesnakes nearby.  Tracks that could belong to any type of hungry carnivore.  A great place for a picnic.

Relaxation is subjective.  I was not relaxing when sliding down hillsides onto trucking roads with my male cousins.  Not relaxing trying to jump over a rushing creek only to slip and fall in and have to drag yourself to safety.  Not relaxing when stepping onto a red anthill and enduring their sting.  There was an incident when I lost my shoes.  It is a miracle I made it out alive.

On a side note, even in the city life was dangerous I told myself.  There was a time when I was following my cousins on a big wheel and they lost me in the dark.  I pedaled around the ever-darkening streets of the apartment complex until a man found me crying and unable to find my way home.  In a stroke of sheer luck that would indeed follow me my entire life, he picked me up into his arms and carried me home.  He just so happened to know my aunt and where they lived.

I began to embrace the dangers of living in the mountains.  There were things you did and did not do.  My hair was bleached white and my skin a golden brown.  I was beginning to get the hang of living like a savage.  Then in one moment, my father helping to put a roof on someone’s trailer distracted me, and I stepped back onto a nail.  A rusty nail.

I remember my mother being angry I was so careless as I sat in the doctor’s office having my wound cleaned and receiving a tetanus shot.  My foot was bandaged and I was told to hop around for support.  In other words, I was house bound in that trailer for another week.  I almost missed that mouse.